


I Wish I Could Live Again in Your Age

by butterflydreaming (chrysalisdreams)



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: 10 Years in Fandom, Challenge Response, Gen, Minor Character(s), Tsukimine Shrine Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 04:57:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/butterflydreaming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takashi Yamazaki brings a depressed Naoko Yanagisawa her time capsule from ten years ago. It's all lies, of course. Except that it contains the play that Naoko wrote, reminding her that she had hope once upon a time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wish I Could Live Again in Your Age

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cygna_hime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cygna_hime/gifts).



> From a letter in the Osaka Castle time capsule: A contest was held among Japanese schoolchildren to write a letter addressed To the People living 5,000 from now. The winner was a fourth grader from Tokyo who wrote: “How are you, people of 5,000 years from now? I wish I could live again in your age but I am quite happy now. I have kind parents and also a sister with whom I quarrel with once in a while. We must do our best until the next age takes over. Goodbye from 5,000 years in the past.”

 

  
Chiharu and Yamazaki said their goodbyes with smiles, and Naoko walked back up through the lobby to the elevator. On the way up to her apartment, she started thinking again about pending homework, laundry, and the whole list of things she had been putting off. It made her tired just to think of it. She dropped her keys on the low table in the corner of her home that served as dining space and living room. She deflated into the sofa. The cushions were still warm where her visitors had been sitting.

Spread across the little table, the childish contents of the time capsule were at odds with her contemporary furniture. The way the mementos spilled out around the little stapled-together booklet struck her fancifully; they seemed turned toward her in waiting, faceless but expectant.

She sat down again by the table. Reaching out, she moved aside the various items that, ten years ago, her elementary school classmates had chosen to represent their time and their hopes. She picked up the booklet and turned the crackling pages. She ran her fingers over the purple mimeograph printing of her name as the author.

“Naoko-chan,” she told her past self, “I was so happy when I was you. I wish that I could live again that way.” She didn’t want to read the play again. It had been horrible, and funny, when Yamazaki and Chiharu had read out the scene of the prince and princess meeting in disguise. Naoko had not laughed that way in longer than she could remember. It was obvious that the newlyweds retained all the closeness that they had had as children, in spite of adult responsibilities and expectations.

She renewed the hot water in the teapot and refilled her mug with steaming tea. Booklet in her lap, she leaned back against the comfortable sofa pillow, sipping her green tea and turning the pages. As a child, she had written countless plays and stories. She didn’t finish every one, but she did pen “the end” on most of them. Back then, she could get distracted, but she was not easily discouraged. She thought about how she had once been a girl who fell asleep already dreaming, instead of a woman who crawled into bed each night feeling relieved that another day had ended.

She had continued writing for enjoyment through middle school, high school, and her first months of university, although time became scarce after middle school. Her stories changed, too, at that time from fantasy adventures to fantasy romances that she had been too shy to share with her friends and rarely completed writing. By high school, everyone else had a real life sweetheart, anyway. Chiharu had Yamazaki, Sakura was reunited with Li, and Rika had become old enough for an official engagement to Terada-sensei. Naoko gave a brief moment of thought to the boy who had been her long distance “boyfriend.” Their pen pal romance had ended when the boy found someone he liked that was more geographically compatible. They said that they would stay friends, but it didn’t take long until he stopped answering Naoko’s letters one-for-one.

Somehow she had ended up where she was now: no social life, a staid job, taking antidepressants that didn’t seem to work, and not writing. No wonder she was depressed, she considered. No wonder it took effort to get up and dress each morning.

She might not have been engaged enough to notice, if Yamazaki had not been waiting for her outside the office where she worked.  
.  
.  
.  
Naoko cradled the manila file folders on one arm so that she could push up her glasses and open the file drawer. She tucked a folder in among the others, then proceeded to the drawer for the next folder on the stack. This was her occupation for most of her job hours: returning files to their appropriate places. Some of the rest of the time was spent entering data, sometimes from the same files, into a computer. She didn’t have a desk or computer of her own. There were stations for all of the part time staff to use as needed. She didn’t feel strongly one way or another about her job, but besides being a student, she couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else. It was dull work, she could not imagine that anything else would be different.

She was dumbfounded when Takashi Yamazaki appeared outside of the law office building just as she was leaving her job. After the unexpected reunion on the train a week past with Takashi Yamazaki and Chiharu Mihara -- now Chiharu Yamazaki -- Naoko Yanagisawa had no expectations of seeing her former schoolmates for another ten years, if ever. Naoko thought about the mountain of university homework waiting for her and tried to slip away before he saw her.

“Yanagisawa-san!” he called out to her, jogging along the sidewalk to catch up to her before she crossed the street.

The walk light was red. Naoko could not escape, so she turned and made some effort to raise a smile. “What are you doing here, Yamazaki-kun? It’s such a surprise to see you again.”

Yamazaki grinned. “Did you know that philosophers in ancient times used to declare that there were no coincidences, only ‘hitzuzen’? Well,” he laughed, “after our chance meeting, my blushing bride reminded me about the time capsule.”

“Which time capsule?” Naoko’s curiosity lifted its head, struggling through the gloom that weighed on her like thick fog. Naoko pushed up her glasses again.

“You don’t remember the one our homeroom class made when we graduated from grade school? Terada-sensei had us all contribute something about our school years together.”

“I… remember that a little bit, now,” Naoko said, though she was unsure that she did remember. It felt hard to think. It had been that way for her for years now, on and off seasons of depression that made her listless and vague. Intellectually she knew that some days were better. She knew that, but they all still felt the same, a rote of school and work and little else.

“Chiharu and I remembered that we didn’t see you at the reunion, when the time capsule was opened. It was at the school festival.”

“Oh. I did get the invitation to that. I wasn’t able to go… after all. School. And my job.”

Yamazaki turned and looked back at the office tower. “I always thought that you would be doing something creative. It was a surprise to us when you said that you were working as a filing clerk.” The crosswalk light turned green. Neither Naoko nor Yamazaki moved. The young man laughed lightly. “I’m meeting Chiharu at the studio where she teaches. Would you join us for a drink? Tea, or something to eat?”

He started to cross, leading the way, and Naoko felt awkward doing anything but following. Chiharu’s dance studio was in the same direction as Naoko’s apartment. Unless she went out of her way, she couldn’t avoid walking along with Takashi Yamazaki.

Chiharu was just letting out her class to the arms of waiting parents when Naoko and Takashi walked up. Excited five-year-olds filed out of the dance space. Chiharu wrapped a towel around her neck and greeted her husband and old friend with a broad smile and exclamations of pleased surprise. “I won’t take long wrapping up,” she told them. “If you wait for me at the bakery next door, I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

The warm bakery smelled like sugar and butter. Naoko walked by the place often, but had never stopped in. She found herself drawn to the decorative cookies that looked like jewels under the glass. She couldn’t remember when she last felt any special interest in food. When Chiharu arrived, Naoko surprised everyone, including herself, by suggesting tea at her place with a box of goodies from the bakery. The Yamazakis agreed with unanimous enthusiasm for the idea.

Naoko welcomed her friends into her apartment. It was small and a little untidy, but she had conservative, contemporary decor and reasonably good furniture. For a moment, however, she saw it from Chiharu’s eyes and wondered why everything was beige or gray.

When the tea and cookies were served, and everyone had a comfortable seat, Naoko felt a pinch of curiosity about the time capsule box. “Can I see what’s inside?” she asked.

Takashi and Chiharu started to speak at the same time, then stopped to let the other speak. They shared a laugh, and then Chiharu opened the box to take out a booklet. “I think you will be interested in this,” Chiharu offered. “It’s the play you wrote for Nadeshiko Festival that year.”

“Aw, honey, you erased the suspense,” complained Takashi affably. “I wanted to tell Naoko-san about the other things, first.” He brought out a white feather and started to hand it to Naoko. “Hiiragizawa wasn’t in our class anymore, but he wanted to leave us something from his new pet owl--”

Chiharu grabbed his hand and pushed it back down. “The other items are not important,” she sing-songed at her husband. She asked Naoko, “Remember your play? Tomoyo made all those beautiful costumes, and all of us were in it, even Meilin who was visiting? All because you wrote a play for us to do at the festival.”

“I do remember the play,” Naoko mused. “You didn’t get to play the prince, after all,” she noted.

“I think I still remember the part,” noted Takashi. He flipped the pages and opened the script to the some of the prince’s dialog.

Chiharu leaned against him so that she could read. “I’ll play the princess!”  
.  
.  
.  
Naoko sipped at her mug and was surprised that it was empty. Instead of her to-do list, she had been daydreaming. She closed the script and placed the booklet on the cushion beside her. The other children had loved the play. She remembered being joyful because she could contribute to everyone’s fun. Writing had not been about praise, although the praise energized her to write more things for sharing. She dreamed of being an author then, imagining her grown-up self doing the thing she loved most.

She wondered, could she start writing again? What did it take, except sitting down and doing it? She moved to get her laptop, opened it in her lap and opened up a blank document. She didn’t have a concrete idea, but so many of her stories had started with no inspiration, just desire and a blank page.

The page seemed very blank. She sighed, wondering why she thought even for a moment that she could be like her childhood self again. Why bother? Who cared if she ever wrote anything? She got up to gather up the mess on the table and start doing other chores.

She tossed the variety of objects back into the box, thinking about how Takashi had remembered who had put each item in and some amusing fact relating to it. She still could not remember her class assembling a time capsule. None of the items or their stories jogged her memory. They didn’t seem very personal or even very time specific. In fact, with Chiharu emitting chagrin through all the stories, it had been just like when they had been children. That feather -- had Takashi been making a Harry Potter joke? When the books became popular, even she had thought that bespeckled Eriol looked a lot like the illustrations of Harry.

The script really was hers, however. If the rest of the “time capsule” was fake, that meant that either Takashi or Chiharu had saved a copy all this time. Something she wrote mattered enough for one of them to preserve for ten years. More than that, both of them had participated in a scheme to make her remember that age.

Naoko left the time capsule items as they were and returned to her computer. She typed away, putting some words after others. It was nothing great: a little scene of the great wizard Merlin awaking in a cave, struggling to break the spell that bound him and endeavoring to work his magic again.

It didn’t matter if only one or two people ever read it, or if nobody read it. Writing, creating something, was better than being crushed by her depression. She would still have to do her homework and her laundry, but for the meanwhile, she would write a story. Naoko was suddenly very glad that the Yamazakis had brought her the time capsule, even if it had been a lie.  


 


End file.
